Walk Up – first-look review

Paired with The Novelist’s Film which pre­miered ear­li­er this year, Hong Sang-soo’s lat­est Walk Up is anoth­er bou­tique noir that explores his recur­rent themes of artis­tic frus­tra­tion and cre­ative stag­na­tion. Sat­u­rat­ed with the South Kore­an auteur’s sig­na­ture dia­logue scenes, this mono­chrome delight – with a refresh­ing focus on visu­als rather than texts – stands out among his recent works. Framed with­in one pho­to­genic walk-up in Seoul, the chiaroscuro of light and shad­ow cap­tures the ambi­gu­i­ty of friend­ship and romance.

The film slides into a mun­dane start right out­side the walk-up owned by Ms. Kim (Lee Hye-yeong), an estab­lished inte­ri­or design­er, who greets her old friend Byung­soo (Kwon Hae-hyo), an inter­na­tion­al­ly-renowned art­house film­mak­er, and his daugh­ter Jeong­su (Park Mi-so) seek­ing her tutorship.

As Jeong­su soon con­fides in Ms. Kim about Byungsoo’s cow­ardice and avoid­ance as a hus­band and father, the age-old tale of a two-faced artist comes to the fore. While Jeong­su serves as a one-off intro­duc­tion to his domes­tic past life, Byung­soo as the film’s pro­tag­o­nist pro­ceeds to move up this build­ing one floor at a time, seek­ing fan­girl admi­ra­tion and finan­cial security.

Hong takes a min­i­mal­is­tic, expres­sion­is­tic approach to maneu­ver­ing space and time with­in the build­ing. Com­bined with pre­cise cin­e­matog­ra­phy that accen­tu­ates its archi­tec­tur­al vari­eties, his seam­less edits piece togeth­er Byungsoo’s scat­tered life as a strug­gling artist and ser­i­al dater. The result is a grayscale scroll unfold­ing upwards on screen – and Byung­soo fail­ing upwards in his per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al life.

Hyp­no­tized by Hong’s intri­cate­ly mis­cel­la­neous mise-en-scenes along with his sil­very gui­tar scores, we com­fort­ably doze off to a series of tip­sy con­ver­sa­tions about var­i­ous conun­drums of main­tain­ing rela­tion­ships and mak­ing art. These repet­i­tive, nat­u­ral­is­tic dia­logues laced with jeal­ousy and inse­cu­ri­ty are a charm­ing sta­ple of Hong’s author­ship. Few oth­er film­mak­ers can trans­form these fick­le, impal­pa­ble yet vis­cer­al mat­ters into grip­ping sto­ry­telling with impec­ca­ble pace and flow.

Hong’s films often resem­ble per­son­al jour­nals, reflect­ing on par­tic­u­lar stages of his real-life – reimag­ined with pseu­do-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal pro­tag­o­nists. In this sense, Walk Up is no exception.

With­out leav­ing his com­fort zone, Hong expands the mar­gins of his reper­toire just a lit­tle bit more in this film anchored by a new theme of an artist’s incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty with domes­tic­i­ty. Per­haps he made this film with his own failed mar­riage and estranged daugh­ter in mind, while nev­er­the­less div­ing head­first into the infi­nite ques­tion­ing of his art and the inces­sant pur­suit of his muse – just like Byungsoo.